The industry of online reputation is constantly changing and evolving. Every single day there is some news coming out of online reputation management. Andy Beal is one of the most respected specialists in online reputation management and one of the many individuals who creates those frequent changes in the industry.

Beal on Video

Beal can be followed on Twitter at @AndyBeal. I highly suggest you do so. His blog, MarketingPilgrim, is well worth reading too. Beal has over ten years of marketing experience that allow him to have unique insights into where the industry is going. Certainly many people have a lot of opinions about the industry and it’s direction, but few voices are as respected as Beal’s.

It is important to understand exactly how reputation management services work before hiring a firm to do them for you. This video provides a very good overview of the process as it exists now.

The Berkman Center For Internet and Society at Harvard is one of the most advanced academic centers for studying how the Internet effects social situations and injects social pressures into an otherwise non-social activity. The video below features journalists and lawyers from top law firms, press outlets, and companies discussing the issues of online defamation. One of the most important issues discussed is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Enjoy, reputation management services nerds.

This video is from Good Morning America on ABC. In the clip, the individuals talk at length about how your online reputation can be damaged. One of the ladies in the clip talks about how one’s online reputation can be severely damaged by a picture randomly placed online or a mean comment from some anonymous person.

The clip also goes through the story of Ashley Payne, a school teacher who was forced to resign because of pictures posted online. Basically the entire purpose of the clip is to demonstrate the danger of online defamation.

When a real problem occurs for a major business, advertising is one of the only ways that companies can reach out and repair their reputations. BP is one of the many companies that has run into a real problem and had to confront it through heavy advertising.

One of the ways that BP has tried to fix their reputation problem is apparently by purchasing Google AdWords. In fact, they were spending only roughly $57,000 per month in the months before the oil spill, but in June alone they were one of the top advertisers with Google–spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.6 million in that month alone.

This is no coincidence, BP did not suddenly discover Google AdWords’ efficacy in June. They began using Google AdWords because they had a major reputation management campaign in the works. Google AdWords can be highly effective, as BP has found, at advertising to targeted markets.

This video is an incredibly interesting discussion involving online defamation, intellectual property, copyright, and Google Reputation Management. Evan Brown works in all of those fields and talks, at length, about online lawsuits. He is a lawyer in Chicago who works for Hinshaw & Culbertson and  maintains a blog called “Internet Cases”.

This excellent video, taken from a British talk show, discusses issues like fake Facebook profiles and online defamation. The show, called Richard & Judy, talks at length about online defamation. Kerrie Harvey and Graham Cluley guest star on the show and offer their opinions on internet defamation.

Long tail search is considered by those in the know at Google to be a sure fire sign that a website is populated naturally through organic content writing, and anybody that’s read the Matt Cutts blog or done any research into SEO or search engine reputation management will know that these are exactly the sites that can be primed to go a long way in search results. So, this raises a number of questions specifically on how to optimise your website for so called long tail keywords.

First of all, it’s important to define a long tail keyword. It is typically a search phrase consisting of at least 3 words, usually more. It receives very few searches individually but will also attract very targeted traffic, generate excellent conversion rates, and when all long tail keywords are combined they can actually generate a huge amount of traffic, conversions, and profits for your website.

The problem is that with nominal searches conducted for these phrases, most keyword research tools won’t display them so how do you find out what they are?

The simple answer is that you write naturally about the topic of a page, provide valuable information, and let the words do the rest. In reality, though, it doesn’t hurt to give the words a helping hand.

Look through your site logs and your site analytics in order to find keywords that are generating traffic. Don’t ignore those that have only generated two or three hits in the last month and consider whether there are any other related long tail keywords you can work into your content.

Here’s Matt Cutts talking about the MayDay update and giving a little insight into long tail keyword optimisation.

In this video we see that a model was the victim of some online defamation. Instead of taking it lying down, she fought back.

Model Defamed

The video just goes to show that anyone can be subject to online defamation. Whether you are famous or obscure, nice or mean, tall or short. The malcontents who commonly do this will spare no one.

This is precisely why search engine reputation management is so popular these days. People do not like being defamed and want to fight back against such injustices.

The problems of Online Reputation Management are often quite difficult to even understand, much less solving the problem. Videos are occasionally helpful in order to clear things up. One can fit much more information in much less time, without being overwhelmed.

This video is from a guy who discusses Insurance Agents and Online Reputation Management. It’s pretty good, if a little too specific.